Today's most advanced media processing systems are mechanical, rather than computational, devices. They directly manipulate extents of temporal media in the same manner as the first film editing systems at the dawn of the century, and their users are still required to think that way. In order to understand how even the most advanced media editing systems operate, one can imagine a virtual robot arm manipulating media according to temporal in and out points. A different model of the content being operated upon, and of the operations being performed, could result in different methods of media production and different kinds of media productions. Two historical analogies are illustrative in this connection. The first relates to the invention of manufactured interchangeable parts in the process of gun manufacture in the later part of the 18th century. Before the invention of interchangeable parts, gun manufacture suffered from a lack of standardization and reusability of components. Every part was a unique result of handicraft, rather than a standardized manufactured component. The invention of manufactured interchangeable parts transformed gun production from a pre-industrial to an industrial mode of production. In the later part of the twentieth century, media production methods have yet to achieve the stage of industrialization reached by gun manufacture at the end of the eighteenth century. The current invention aims to alter that situation.
In order for media to be produced by means of the manufacture of interchangeable parts, purely mechanical modes of production are insufficient. Computational media production methods are required, in a manner analogous to the invention in the 1980's of computational production methods in software design which enabled the simple definition, creation, and reuse of software components.
The ability to quickly, simply and iteratively produce new media content is of special interest in contexts where movie-making has been historically hampered by lack of skill and resources. In particular, home consumer production of movie content suffers from the lack of the following three capabilities which are needed to meet these objectives:
easy-to-use yet powerful composition tools PA1 access to media content which cannot be produced in the home PA1 tools for producing high-quality soundtracks (including multitrack music, dialogue, narration, and sound effects) PA1 (automatically, semi-automatically, and manually generated descriptive data that represent the content of media signals) PA1 (functional relationships that operate on content representations and media signals to compute new media content)
Another limitation associated with current media processing systems is the fact that they are poorly suited for the re-use of pre-existing media content. This is especially the case in situations in which the cost and/or difficulty of creating new media content exceed the cost and/or difficulty of reusing existing media content. For consumers wishing to participate in media productions, access to existing media is of paramount importance given their lack of production skill, financial resources, and media assets. Currently, there is no mechanism by which pre-existing recordings can be efficiently retrieved and combined to present the desired effect.
In summary, there is a need for a time-based media processing system which is capable of providing high-quality, adaptive media productions without requiring a significant level of skill on the part of the user, and is therefore suited for use by the average consumer. The objective of the invention is to enable new efficiencies, methods, and forms in the production and distribution of media content. The invention also aims to satisfy a need for a media-processing system which facilitates the re-use of media content, and indirectly the labor and expertise that created it.